There’s quite a sprawling discussion on death in this thread if you’re interested.
In terms of your suggestion, I feel it could work if it was a really rare event. If this happened with every death I can see it becoming more of a burdensome task than simply dealing with the dead bodies.
Having to constantly deal with the ‘ghost’ to avoid production debuffs etc. I think would quickly becoming tiring and annoying.
As for perhaps a module, or random event where the spirit of a lost settler returns with a quest for some sort of reward, then that definitely sounds like something I could get on board with.